HITTING BACK IN CENTRAL AMERICA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000807580029-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 15, 2012
• Sequence Number: 29
• Publication Date: August 6, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/11/15: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807580029-6
ARTICLE APPcaRE
ON PAGE ?
Philip Geyelin
Hitting
Back in
Central
America
Speaking privately, U.S. officials
deny that President Reagan is spoilmg
for a swipe at training camps for Sal-
vadoran rebel hit teams in Nicaragua..
You can forget the rumors that he is
itching to offset the impression of
weakness conveyed by failure to re- -
taliate for the bombing of the U.S. Ma-
rine compound in Lebanon, or slaying
of Americans in El Salvador last June,
or the hijacking of TWA Flight 847. 4
Quite the contrary, we are told. The
recent stiff note to the Sandinista gov-
ernment in Managua means simply
what it says: the United States has
good reason to think the Sandinistas '
are schooling "terrorists" for attacks
on "U.S. personnel" in Honduras and
that it had at least a hand in the shoot-
ing of the six Americans, including
four Marines, in San Salvador. Any
more of that sort of stuff will have
"serious repercussions" is all the
United States was saying. Deterrence,
not stage-setting for a show of
strength, is all the administration had
in mind.
I believe it?up to a point. That is, I
believe that there is a powerful re-
straining force at work in the Reagan
administration and that it resides in a
high place. It was Ronald Reagan, by
his own account, who held back after
the Marine bombing. His was the loud-
est voice of prudence at the time of
the TWA hijacking. It was his concern
for "collateral" loss of innocent lives,
I'm told, that weighed most heavily
against a plan to strike at suspected
Nicaraguan training camps right after
the killings in El Salvador.
That said, the possibility that the
administration will feel compelled to
conduct a "surgical" U.S. air strike at
Nicaraguan targets by no means dimi-
nishes. Deterrence is a dicey business.
It becomes all the more chancy when
you take into account the nature of the
forces at work against restraint.
WASHINGTON POST
6 August 1985
The Sandinistas say, in effect: Look,
no hands. No matter, we say: The in-
telligence evidence constitutes a solid
case for holding Nicaragua responsible
in a general way for future hostile acts
against one form or another of the
American presence in Central Amer-
ica?military, diplomatic, civilian. The
crucial question then becomes
whether the Sandinistas can be con-
vincingly held responsible for even
those anti-American terrorists, acts
that can be traced directly or indi-
rectly to Nicaraguan nests for terror- ,
ist training?
Obviously, we are not talking about
a court of law. But we are talking
about possible acts of war and about
the prospects for Nicaraguan re-
sponges and U.S. escalation, for which
there could be a need at some point
for a measure of American public un-
derstanding and support. The Nicara-
guan provocation, then, must not only
be real but as a practical matter it will
have to be presentable in a way that
will make it look real.
This, in turn, presupposes a level of ?
Nicaraguan regimentation over the
dirty tricks it sponsors that the U.S.
government disavows for its own ac-
tivities. Responding to the recent U.S.
note, Nicaraguan President Daniel
Ortega said: "Nicaragua has neither
practiced nor supported terrorism, nor
has it been involved in any terrorist
act." More specifically, the Sandinista
foreign ministry formally declared
that, "Nicaragua rejects any sugges-
tion at all of responsibility for what
happened. .. in San Salvador or in any
other similar situations that occur in
that or any other country."
You don't have to believe a word of
all that to hear an echo in the disclaim-
ers of CIA Director William Casey in
an interview last June with U.S. News
and World Report. He was asked
about any connection between his
agency and a car-bombing by a Leba-
nese counterterrorist group last
March that killed 80 people but
missed its targett the leader of an ex-
tremist and violence-prone Shiite
movement. "We worked to strengthen
[the Lebanese government's counter-
terrorist] capabilities, [to] train them,
give them technical support. But they
do any operations themselves. We
were not involved, and no one we had
trained was involved in the Lebanese
car-bombing operation."
Careful words?careful enough not
to rule out what is thought to have
happened: ? the U.S.-trained Lebanese
counterterrorist forces subcontracted,
so to say, the caicbombing to free-
lance terrorists, who did the job. The
is simply that if U.S.-badted
point
counterterrorism can get
out of 'LLS. control, it is not too out-
landish to believe that, given the na-
ture of terrorism and those whoyrac-
tice it, the same could happen in the
case of terronazn Nicaraguan-style.
It is this thtY?that the San-
dinistas are no more cvable of con-
trolling events they set in train than
Bill Casey claims to be?that makes
an already precarious game of chicken
even more precarious. Going public
with previous private warnings to
Managua plarys into the hands of the
hard-liners in the president's midst,
the more so since previous threats of
retaliation have gone unfulfilled.
The result is that almost any new
anti-American terrorist incident in the
neighborhood, however remote its
connection to Nicaragua, could put
Ronald Reagan's prudence-in-practire
to its heaviest test.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/11/15: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807580079-R